JAZZ VIEW

JAZZ VIEW; An Rx for What Ails the Jazz Concert Hall

By Peter Watrous

Published: February 22, 1998

IF JAZZ at Lincoln Center does in fact receive a new space at the New York Coliseum at Columbus Circle, as was proposed two weeks ago, the architects and sound designers will have an easy set of prescriptions to follow: Make the space sound like the Village Vanguard. Make it feel like the Apollo Theater. And make it look like the Palacio de la Salsa in Havana, a dance hall with an area by the stage that can be cleared of seats. If all this comes to pass, the jazz-concert experience in New York will be radically different from what it has been.

The Village Vanguard, the 62-year-old club on Seventh Avenue South in Greenwich Village, has become the standard against which all other jazz spaces are judged, and the new hall should have its warm, perfectly clear acoustics. One of the Vanguard's virtues is the ease with which its natural acoustics accommodate amplified instruments. Its biggest virtue is that it allows the instruments in a band to be heard as equals; the drums and brass do not overwhelm the piano and bass. And that sort of sonic clarity can't be found anywhere else in New York.

More than ever, jazz is being heard in the concert hall, and those of us who frequent the great music halls of the city dread having to hear there any music with amplification or percussion. Those halls were designed with European concert music in mind; the goal was to make the violins heard in the farthest reaches. European concert music isn't known for its reliance on percussion, and when such instruments enter the likes of Carnegie Hall or Avery Fisher Hall, the sound becomes unbalanced.

Loud drums obscure the sounds of the rest of the instruments, and the tendency by sound engineers is to crank up the amplification of the other instruments to resist the tidal wave of percussion. But what works at the Vanguard is a disaster at Carnegie Hall. With their reverberating echo, the great halls are sonically alive, but they get nervous and agitated by the commotion of American vernacular music.

So Jazz at Lincoln Center's new hall must handle the roar of the drums and the shout of the trumpets. It has to make sure that all instruments receive the same treatment and that amplification, now a necessary evil, can be accommodated. Each instrument should be heard, without bullying from drums and brass.

The hall should also have the intimacy and vitality of the Apollo Theater, the legendary concert hall on 125th Street in Harlem. To experience a show there is to understand its value as a welcoming place for music: with several balconies, it is vertically laid out, putting most of the seats so close to the stage that the audience can almost be part of the performance.

This proximity to the stage has another benefit: it allows the audience to pick up on the visual cues that the musicians use. The visual interaction that occurs between the musicians can give a jazz performance extra meaning. The musicians are improvising, and when something good happens, they react, smiling at one another. Band members who look at one another are usually band members who are listening to one another. And that interaction brings the audience into the playful game that jazz often is. Ideas get bounced around a band. The exuberance and invention of the musicians become contagious.

THAT CONTAGION sometimes prompts dancing, and as Jazz at Lincoln Center has set its sights on Afro-Cuban music and swinging big-band jazz, it should allow for this sort of expression. Jazz began as a dance music, and at its best it still retains dance music's vitality. Not only do swing societies still maintain the older dance styles, but, increasingly, young musicians are looking to merge different forms of popular music with jazz. There's no reason that Jazz at Lincoln Center shouldn't take advantage of this dance activity. It is historically important to see the rhythmic relationship between dancers and the music; it explains in part both how Afro-Cuban music and jazz developed and how they function.

A good working model in this regard is the Palacio de la Salsa, in the Hotel Rivera in Havana. There, a dance space in front of the stage is surrounded by rising banks of seats. Seeing people up on their feet dancing at a jazz concert makes clear the difference between the European idea of a concert hall -- solemn and still -- and the kinetic reality of the American experience of music.

All of these ideas run counter to the history of classical concert-hall design in the United States. There has never been a hall to accommodate the sound of the drum, and even if Jazz at Lincoln Center's hall is built over the next three years -- which is not certain as yet, because of the vagaries of city politics and finance -- the 20th century, which musically speaking has been defined by black idioms and the drum, will have gone by without any large space designed for jazz and Latin music in New York or anywhere.

The good news is that Jazz at Lincoln Center has already been thinking about most of these issues. The hall it proposes to build would fit 1,100 people into a space 40 feet shorter than Alice Tully Hall, which has a comparable seating capacity, thereby bringing more of the audience closer to the stage. As for dancing, though, that may just be a dream. If the hall includes space for it, then jazz will have moved not one step but two toward an American ideal.